


The Sound and the Fury

by MMXIII



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, M/M, Murder Husbands, Psychopaths In Love, criminal boyfriends, mild to ostentatious insanity XD, mormor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-11
Packaged: 2017-12-19 05:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/879760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MMXIII/pseuds/MMXIII
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim is a star, blazing caustically...<br/>And Sebastian has an elliptical orbit</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sound and the Fury

**The Sound and the Fury**

The vor v zakonye might have understood, in deliberate half-truths and asphalt smirks; there’s a crooked honour in deceit.

Sebastian is the fortress, locked & loaded, reticent, intuitive, [resolutely] unafraid. He isn’t just a ‘safe’ pair of [dextrous, scarred] hands, he’s a steady pace, a strong back, an unforgiving cadence. Aggressive curiously only when provoked, he’s volatile in the way that is useful: predictably. He stands in the eye of the storm, in Havana, Vegas, Singapore, Moscow, watching its creator flit between [glorious] carnage and [hateful] stasis.  
It’s possible that he’s come to mistake relief for something like affection. He probably doesn’t care.

Most importantly, the length of Sebastian’s stride is _always_ the same; Jim loves recalibrating quantifiable impact.

Jim himself is rather more chimerical, his Irish sublimates from whimsical to mob in 0.3 seconds, and his hands, his hands never shake. He is brilliant, obviously, deliriously so, but oh so very changeable. Sebastian is positively languid by comparison, the rock upon which Jim [on his tiptoes] constructs his gloriously skew hall of mirrors.  
His avenue of up-ended, burnt-out Jaguars.  
His _cathedral_ of bones.

Jim is a star, blazing caustically, like [velvet] upholstery saturated with [royal] kerosene.

And Sebastian has an elliptical orbit.

He strays momentarily, because Jim is an _arse_ , only to be recovered like the shore is recovered when the tide rolls in again. Indeed [dammit] Jim is restless, relentless, ruthless though predictably unpredictable, not dissimilarly to the ways in which Sebastian is unconventionally conventional. Eatsleepfightfuck, the latter wonders idly what Jim would concede to be his cardinal preoccupations. ‘Probably wouldn’t even be verbs’ he mutters at the chiaroscuro skyline.

‘Adjectives darling’ comes the serpentine response, carried by the voice that soothes and lacerates simultaneously on both sides of the river. ‘more dynamic?’ there’s a pause, and then, ‘we don’t need any nouns, you and I’. Unexpected, but not uncharacteristic he supposes; Jim doesn’t like to rely on extraneous people, places and things. As for Sebastian, he’s been irreversibly assimilated, something he won’t really understand until years from now.

 

* * *

  
Sebastian is the running, the waiting, the killing.  
Jim is how

                                                                Fast  
                                              Slow

                                                                           Viscerally

              Feverishly

                                                                                                           Hysterically  
                                                                   Malignantly  
                                                                                                 Hellishly

                   Childishly  
                                                 Tortuously  
 Bleakly

                                                                _Desperately_

‘Dammit James slow down!’ Sebastian yells, only to wonder a split second later when that particular phrase developed so much urgency. ‘Hold the line Moran’ Jim snarls. But Sebastian is always faster and stronger, he takes risks Jim wouldn't take because he doesn't care if he wins or not, he’s along for the adrenaline-jacked ride. ‘What line?’ he breathes into the ear of the most dangerous man in London.  
‘The one you put your life on’  
‘That’s a metaphorical line’  
Jim grins wolfishly, all teeth  
Sebastian thinks later he will probably need stitches

 

* * *

 

Sebastian reckons Jim can _smell_ blood, like a shark, one drop in tank of unadulterated quiet and he’s circling with sunken eyes.  
Leaning over the sink, Sebastian grimaces, easing a shard of glass from the fleshly expanse between his thumb and index finger on his right hand. Flakes of rusty congealed blood dust the lip of the ivory sink like cinnamon. There’s blood everywhere.  
James, always James out of hours, who is only wearing one sock, draws a line in the blood with his bare foot and pokes out his tongue like a reptile, ‘all of that is yours. I can _taste_ it’  
Sebastian eyes him warily in what’s left of the mirror, each shard reflecting a splinter of Jim’s fractured personality, ‘too many consonants, not enough alcohol’ he breathes, swaying almost imperceptibly though enough to coax the fraying shadow further into the room.

‘You know all the hedonism lies in the vowels, darling’

 

* * *

 

Sebastian knows Jim’s hurtling divinity is from hell  
[there’s no point being afraid of what’s inevitable]  
He remembers the words from his [fancypants] school

Omniscient  
Omnipresent  
Omnipotent

_Omnimalignant_

Because Jim is a little bit off, dark & impenetrable, like God and thunderstorms; there’s a faith and a charge in his lungs, but it has never been extraneous. He is the source, the catalyst, the reaction and the fallout. Similarly, he is also the catharsis; the cellophane of his skin barely suppresses the visceral colour of his rage, the tranquillity of his hysteria, the arrhythmic stasis of his neurosis. He imagines the Styx in his mind’s eye, but he has conquered and christened the vast [putrid] delta; ‘madness is a lot like death is it not?’ Sebastian offers a non committal noise, he only really listens for dangerous tonal shifts. ‘After all, one is only ‘dead’ for as long as the records are kept’.

‘didn’t we burn all the records?’ Sebastian offers, lazily, face down on his mattress, habitually assuming that Jim will hear him anyway. He hears an affirmative giggle as he rolls over, he’s got a mathematical proof written up his arm in crisp black ballpoint, the handwriting both maniacal and oddly boyish.

 

* * *

 

‘fuck it, James’ he murmurs when Jim looks sharp as Catholic hell in a shirt whiter than his teeth and a jacket darker than his caustic eyes.  
Jim smirks, spins on his heel, straightens his tie.

There’s a wall in the[ir] flat feverishly plastered with small strips of paper, plastic, cardboard, photos, clippings, all of which act individually as a constituent part of Jim’s expanded state of mind; he stands as god in the centre and throws himself outward, finding the shape of his container like creeping carbon dioxide, splaying peeling constellations onto the walls. All the sublime formulae Sebastian could never hope understand, lacerated photos, hellish poetry, articles detailing the collateral damaged sustained by the rest of the world as they hurtle through.

Jim knows his Bible too, but Sebastian’s the more Old Testament of the two.

Sebastian likes tradition. He likes to know what the rules are before he splices muscle from bone.  
Jim can’t stand the repetition, ‘there is no justice’ he whispers, ‘there is no hell’, he’s agitated now; refrains needle his brain so he makes his own.  
‘I am he that liveth and was dead’ says Sebastian.  
Jim looks at him with crooked adoration

‘I am he that liveth and was dead’

 

* * *

 

‘Only I could identify your mangled body’ Jim informs him, in the evening, the tone is conversational, immediately rousing suspicion. ‘How sweet’ Sebastian counters sarcastically turning to look at Jim who’s got blood on his chest, [in his hair] but not on his crisp white sleeves. Mark of a good chef Sebastian thinks before he can be either amused or appalled at himself. Jim gives him that awful smile, the one that tastes like standing water; Sebastian shoots a hole in the wall, just a few centimetres shy of the wraith’s ear. ‘eejit’ it snarls playfully, ‘you know you shouldn't break anything you couldn't successfully replace’.  
‘I don’t want to be you, James’ Sebastian laughs  
‘no…’ the other man smirks, ‘you like to watch me _dance_ ’.

If someone did a professional job, cut off Sebastian’s fingers and pulled out his teeth, there would be nothing for the record-keepers to find.  
But Jim would see the writing on the soles of [Sebastian’s] feet and laugh  
‘where are you going?’  
‘what the fuck do you care?’

They absolutely _adore_ all the things that have gone wrong with each other. All the apathy and the amorality

 

* * *

 

Jim uses Sebastian’s real name on all the Russian jobs because he loves the sound of _Seb.ahs.tyehn_ ; so much more melodramatic than the clipped British equivalent, and yet softer, easier to possess.  
Sebastian has always preferred ‘James’. Jim knows it’s because it sounds commanding, regal even, but intimate, because Moriarty isn’t a man, and Jim is a front, but James is left-handed, sleeps [deliberately] on Sebastian’s side of anything [everything], and leaves his shit lying around everywhere.  
Mostly it’s ‘idiot!’ because Sebastian has the audacity to breathe, and ‘you little shit!’ because James has burned everything he owns [so that slowly, slowly, sloooowly, Sebastian will owe him everything he has]  
Jim is either thorough or compulsive

  
Or terrifying when he’s both

 

* * *

 

The devil wears arterial filigree, bone, viscera, hedonism, Versace, _Westwood_. He casts off his sin to shower, and then paints it back on for fun. Sebastian finds it highly amusing, all the whims and the fancies, the silk and the Italian don’t even breathe on it you heathen leather, but he knows James’ capacity for inexplicable violence almost certainly exceeds his own; Jim is an ephemeral monolith, a name and a gut-feeling. Sebastian supposes it’s a lot like vertigo really, if you were to look over the edge, you’d see one of Jim’s mirrors reflecting the sky, and you’d think you were flying rather than falling.  
Giddy right before your chest cavity implodes, and the atlas bone, that so assuredly articulates spine to skull, shatters.

When Sebastian hacks out a laboured cough, Jim knows it’s from all the rust he’s inhaled languishing on structurally unsound balconies.  
When he limps he’s jumped 15 feet from a fire escape.  
When he snarls, Jim slides closer  
When he _bleeds_ , James gets high on the colour  
He’s killed 3 men over Sebastian’s mafia scars  
‘tiger, tiger tiger…’  
Sebastian stalks forward grinning, he lives for the blinding insanity of it all

 

* * *

 

Jim is the patron saint, the pagan deity, of bloody chaos, black hair, black eyes, white teeth, sticky red hands.

‘You’re so funny when you’re cross’ Jim is singing, lilting in stolen voices. Sebastian is furious, hurling antique French chairs out of the way as James darts around them, they sound like splintering bone. James laughs.  
Sebastian throws him against the wall so hard the back of James’ head snaps backwards and forwards within the same blink. ‘Feck’ he coughs, with blood curling at the corners of his mouth, down his face, through the god-complex thudding in his ears.

Sebastian falters at the switchblade smile  
And realises that Jim wouldn’t save himself from his own collateral damage.

 

* * *

 

Sebastian is climbing up the fire escape in Paris, assembling his rifle on the South Bank, waiting for the shot in Rio, taking it on the lower east side, washing the blood off his hands in the fountains of the Vatican.

James is reclining in an ice-cold blood-infused bath with silver lions' feet, fully clothed, comatose. Sebastian drains the awful pink water and turns the fucking heating on.

 

* * *

 

Sebastian makes an irritated sound leaning on a chainlink fence behind a retail park in the arse-end of suburbia. He can’t hold his lighter because the tendons in his dominant wrist have been partially severed. ‘fuck’ he growls, mainly because he really needs a fag or five, and partially because there’s no way he’ll shoot straight again _marymotherofgod_. But Jim wraps Sebastian in his Westwood tie and makes him wait for the nicotine, imperious though barefoot in a three-piece suit.

Sebastian is pretty sure he’s dead  
But Jim knows Sebastian can shoot with his left hand, he can tell from the way he stands at ease, symmetrically poised, [cobalt] eyes forward, [iron] shoulders back. Both fists curled inwards, mind traitorously open. ‘Daddy’s got you’ says Jim, pressing his leer into Sebastian’s jaw like a cat. He’s got death between his teeth, and some strange new chemical in his blood.

 

* * *

 

Both men are somewhat wretched, but not before God; there isn't one  
They both know that

Sebastian from the things he has seen [enraptured]  
and the things he has done [destroyed]  
James knows because his crown, his title, his rites of war  
Have stood unchallenged  
He is a [festering] gilded deviation left to putrefy in the sun  
He is a parasite  
Sebastian is a natural disaster, an inherently unreasonable demonstration of [nauseatingly] charming brutality; he delivers the fatal blow to the back of the skull once Jim has weakened [eaten, poisoned, murdered] the foundations

'Where were you?'  
'Right where you fucking left me'  
'You ought to learn to run faster, Sebastian'  
Sebastian shrugs 'I knew you'd be back'

  
They both grin at opposing walls, one in tentative triumph, one in momentary defeat

Which keeps the game even  
According to a timeless, blood-soaked equilibrium

**Author's Note:**

> * The vor v zakonye are notorious Russian gangsters - 'thieves in law'
> 
> Thank you ^^  
> first time so comments would be especially appreciated!


End file.
